


Perspective

by wwa archive (wisdom_walks_alone)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Gen, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, Self-Insert, oh boy, yeah i had one of those didn't we all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24577528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisdom_walks_alone/pseuds/wwa%20archive
Summary: PJO from the perspective of a random demigod in camp
Relationships: Annabeth Chase & Original Character(s), Annabeth Chase & Percy Jackson, Original Female Character(s) & Original Female Character(s), Original Female Character(s) & Original Male Character(s)
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was me imagining myself and all of the people in my friend circle in 7th grade as demigods. everything is based on real life occurrences and interactions, unfortunately.

When Maddie Goldberg was hit in the head with a pillow at 7:00 am, it could only mean two things: one, her half-brother, Spencer Garfield, was waking her up, or two, her best friend from Apollo had decided to use yet another creative wake up so that she would “rise with the sun” with her. It was most likely the second option, since Spencer was not a morning person either, but he was even more so than Maddie would ever be.

“I swear, Kate, if it's you I'm going to slice you up with my dagger so you'll be unrecognizable as a human being,” she murmured through her pillow, her voice muffled so she wasn't even sure she could be understood.

“I love you, too,” Kate's also muffled voice said. “You're such a pleasure in the morning, aren't you?”

“Stop sounding like my dad.”

“Well your dad is right, if he also says that with sarcasm, which I'm assuming he does since you said I was sounding like him.” Maddie could practically _hear_ her grinning. “It's time to rise and shine sleepyhead!” Another pillow was hurled at her defenseless head.

She could hear groans and a few muttered curses throughout the Athena cabin now. The next voice she heard was Spencer’s. “Kate, if you're going to wake up with the sun every morning, then don't try to wake up a cabin full of people who were up all night reading or working.” His voice was groggy and scratchy, and Maddie figured that's how her voice had also sounded.

“It's not dawn, silly,” Kate said with a laugh somewhere between dolphin and witch cackle. On any other occasion, Maddie would laugh with her and threaten anyone who said her laugh was weird, but right now it just sounded obnoxious. “The sun rose an hour ago! Ish.”

A chorus of “I don’t cares,” “Shut ups,” and a few not-so-nice words were heard. “Ok you bunch of grumpy nerd brainiacs,” Kate huffed, finally. “I’m going. But don’t complain when the conch horn sounds and you’re forced to drag your lazy butts out of bed for breakfast.”

“Lazy SMART butts,” Spencer chimed in drowsily. A few tired and half-hearted snickers sounded, Maddie’s included. She peeled one eye open just in time to see Kate walking out the door.

Taking the opportunity, she promptly fell back to sleep. Hey, she had about another hour and a half before breakfast. Might as well get some more sleep.

Another pillow was thrown at her head around 8:00, and this time it was Spencer.

“Wake up, Maddie!” he called. “Half hour before breakfast.” Maddie rolled onto her back but made no effort to get out of bed.

“But I don’t want to,” she complained.

“We were all up late last night now _get up._ ”

Maddie groaned and rolled off the bed, then she put on her glasses before she stood up and dragged herself to her trunk of clothes and other various belongings.

“ _We were all up late last night now_ get up,” she mimicked as she saw Spencer roll his eyes. “Hey Spencer?”

“What?”

“Have you seen Eli?”

“Wasn't here when I woke up.”

Maddie pulled out a pair of shorts and sighed. “Okay, thanks.” She stood up and took her clothes into the bathroom. She threw on her camp shirt and shorts, tying her sweatshirt around her waist. She then proceeded to wash her face and braid her hair.

She walked out of the cabin and started to walk towards the arena. Eli liked to sit there sometimes, she knew. She had pretty close relationships with most of her siblings, so she knew most of them well enough to know their habits, Spencer, Eli, and Evelyn, another cabin mate, especially. The only ones she was particularly distanced from were Annabeth Chase and Malcolm Pace.

Her suspicions were correct, and Maddie found Eli sitting by himself on one of the rafters. He was leaning up against the wall, staring blankly out into empty space. Maddie started climbing up and joined him, situating herself so that she was on the rafter next to his. She drew one leg up and rested her elbow on it, leaning her head on the wall.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Good morning.”

“You too.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a while, and Maddie studied him like she did with everyone. She always liked to take in someone's features. It was a weird thing she did. His black hair was cropped in the back, but it hung over his forehead in the front. It was getting longer. He was wearing his usual blue jeans with a black T-shirt, but today he was wearing an unbuttoned blue button up. She smiled a little. She always liked when he wore that button up. It gave him a little splash of color on top of his usual black attire.

“So…” Maddie tried, gaining Eli’s attention. “Wanna pick up that game of alef knoll questions?”

He smiled a little. “Sure.”

Alef knoll questions was their thing. When Eli first came to camp, they annoyed the heck out of each other. Maddie hated how he was always such a grammar nazi and he just found her irritating. But eventually, they opened up to each other. Maddie actually started to make an effort to be friends with him, so she asked him what his interests were. Now, Eli had never been a very good conversationalist, so he ended up typing it out later and printing it out to give her, with some help from a kid from cabin nine. 

She responded by writing her interests on the back of the small paper, which was quite a difficult task with her friend Leah from cabin eleven poking her perfect nose in Maddie’s business. (Not that Maddie considering her nose as perfect made Leah some snobby brat or anything, she was just crazy pretty, with a perfect little nose and perfectly shaped eyebrows. She could’ve been mistaken for a daughter of Aphrodite rather than Hermes.)

But anyway, this started a chain of notes they exchanged with each other, some as long as seven pages of loose leaf. One day, when Maddie was sitting against the back wall of the Athena cabin, Eli joined her and she convinced him to sit with her, despite his evident fear of getting dirty. They talked for a few hours, and to get to know him even better, she started up a game of 20 Questions. After Maddie explained what the game was and how to play it, Eli brought up the point that they were limited to only, well, twenty questions. So she suggested they play infinity questions instead, but he proposed a way to count past infinity (hey, the kid was smart. Maddie had, though Eli humbly and a little self-doubtingly denied it, started thinking of him as no less than a genius; a child worthy of Athena herself.), and alef knoll questions was born.

And so the two sat on the rafters of the open-ceilinged arena together, throwing questions back and forth to each other. Actually, Maddie was asking most of the questions, since Eli claimed to not be very good at coming up with questions. When he did ask questions, he usually said “What about you?” asking her the same question she had asked him. But Maddie enjoyed it nonetheless. (Honestly, he was probably one of her favorite siblings, but she could never tell anyone that; she was too nice.)

They kept at it until the breakfast horn sounded. She hopped from the rafter onto the ground while he climbed down, and they made their way to the dining pavilion. 

The rest of the Athena kids were just arriving when they got there.

“Good timing, eh?” Maddie asked, prodding Eli playfully in the ribs. Her smirk widened into a grin when he smiled and laughed, a thing he tried not to do but always ended up doing when he was with Maddie. She always tried extra hard to make him laugh, and it always made her happy when she was successful.

The pair sat at the table, with Eli on Maddie’s right and Spencer across from her.

“Hey Spencer,” Maddie said, realizing someone was missing. “Where’s Evelyn?”

“Sleeping,” he replied. “She was up later than anyone last night, and you know how hard it is to wake her up. And painful.”

Maddie rolled her eyes. “Let me guess, she was up reading mangas and binge watching anime on her laptop, right?”

Spencer nodded. “And reading her new H.I.V.E. book. She tore through three Black Butler mangas, the book, and watched a season of Blue Exorcist.”

Of course. Besides Spencer, Maddie had known Evelyn the longest out of all her cabin mates. She was always watching downloaded animes on her laptop (even though those were strictly forbidden, but Evelyn had always been a rebellious rule breaker) and reading both books and mangas. Anime and manga were pretty much a good fifty percent of her life.

Maddie shrugged, deciding to let the fact that Evelyn got to sleep in and she didn’t go, and started eating her breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's the author's note i had written in the doc:
> 
> Hey! Thanks for reading! All the characters that are not canon are based on friends of mine or people that go to my school. Naturally, Maddie is based on me. As you may have ready from the summary, this is told from the PoV of a demigod and what her experiences throughout the series. Hope you enjoy!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **annabeth is here**

The next day was the day Percy Jackson arrived.

He was the talk of camp. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing about him.

“Did you hear about that kid who showed up last night?”

“He defeated the Minotaur and even got its horn, I heard.”

“Twelve year old kid killed  _ the Minotaur _ last night. Lucky guy.”

“Who do you think his parent is?”

“He’s got to be the prophecy kid. There’s no way a demigod could be that powerful and  _ not _ be a child of the Big Three.”

After all that, Maddie was getting sick of this bull-fighting kid. She decided that maybe she would check him out for herself.

She hadn’t even made it halfway across camp when Leah and Tess, another Hermes girl, came up to her.

“Hey Maddie,” Leah said, “did you hear about-”

“The boy who defeated the Minotaur last night, got its horn, is probably the hero of that prophecy, and dragged that satyr over the border? Yeah, I heard.”

“Oh. Do you think it’s true?”

“I dunno. We’ll have to wait to find out,” Maddie said, hoping they’ll leave her alone so she could check out what was going on by herself.

“I guess,” Tess piped up. “Say hi to Germeh for me, would ya?”

“Of course,” Maddie answered, smiling just a little bit. They had named the Big House ceiling Germeh when Tess was ten and Maddie was eleven. It was a silly thing, but they had stuck with it and always said hi to him whenever they passed under him.

After saying goodbye to the two, Maddie made her way to the Big House and peeked into sickbay, where Annabeth Chase sat spoonfeeding what Maddie was going to guess was nectar into a boy’s mouth.

“Hey Annabeth,” she said stepping inside. 

Annabeth turned her head, her blond curls falling off one of her shoulders. She was the same age as Maddie, twelve. “Oh hey Maddie,” she said.

“So is this the infamous boy who all the rumors are about?”

“Yep, the one who passed out on the porch gripping an unconscious Grover and a Minotaur horn.”

“Do you really think he’s-”

Annabeth cut her off. “He has to be,” she said, her voice sure and her eyes hard. She turned back to the boy on the bed and shoved another spoonful of nectar in his mouth. “I’m thinking maybe a son of Zeus, but I can’t be sure.”

Maddie nodded. “But, if he’s really the prophecy child, then that would be bad for us. ‘Olympus to preserve or raze.’ This kid could be the key to Olympus’ end.”

“Yeah,” Annabeth agreed, “but he could also be the key to saving it. To  _ preserve  _ or raze. There’s, like, a fifty-fifty chance of either.”

“I guess.” Maddie pulled up a chair next to Annabeth, trying to ignore the awkward tension that followed. “Well, we'd better hope it's the first option then.”

“Yeah.” Annabeth spooned some more ambrosia into the boy’s mouth.

“So do you know his name?” Maddie asked after a little while, desperate to break the awkward silence.

“Percy,” Annabeth answered, “Chiron said his name is Percy. Percy Jackson. Apparently this is the kid Chiron had gone undercover to investigate. That means he’s-”

“A really powerful demigod,” Maddie finished for her.

“Yeah, a really powerful demigod. I just hope this doesn’t turn out like last time, if he is a son of one of the Big Three, I mean.”

Maddie nodded and contemplated putting her hand on Annabeth’s shoulder in an attempt to reassure her, but decided against it since it would probably be awkward. She wasn’t at camp yet when Annabeth, Luke from Hermes cabin, and Thalia, the daughter of Zeus, got to Half-Blood Hill, but almost everyone knew the story. Luke, Annabeth, and Grover the satyr got to the safety of camp while Thalia sacrificed herself so they could do just that and her spirit was turned into a huge pine tree by Zeus that formed a protective border around the camp. Annabeth and Luke were hit the hardest, and maybe the satyr too, so Thalia was kind of a touchy subject for them.

“I’m sure it won’t,” Maddie assured her. “I mean, it’s not likely that another kid will get turned into shrubbery by his father after sacrificing his life.”

“Yeah,” Annabeth said. “But for the record, she was turned into a tree, not a shrub.”

“Same thing,” Maddie said with a wave of her hand. They both cracked a small smile. “I, uh, I’m gonna go now. It was cool talking to you Annie.” She stood up and started towards the door.

“You too,” Annabeth called, smiling. “And don’t call me Annie!”


	3. Chapter 3

Holy Hera were they screwed over.

Poseidon. Percy Jackson was a son of freaking _Poseidon_. Man, was Zeus going to be pissed.

It all started with a weekly game of capture the flag. The Athena kids against the Ares, the basic lead cabins for each team. Cabins five and six were always rivals, so Maddie already knew it would be an intense game. She was a little disappointed they weren't on the same team this time, however, since when they worked together, they were pretty much unbeatable. 

She scowled once she remembered Brian, her sworn enemy, was in the Ares cabin, not to mention Alex. Sure, Clarisse was the one to give her a swirly, but Alex was the one to torment her. She had bullied her when she first got there until Maddie was able to show her she was no force to be reckoned with. 

Well, actually Luke from the Hermes cabin had been the one to stop it, and he even helped her with her sword fighting afterwards. She was no match for him, but even he had to admit she was pretty good for a beginner. 

She owned both a sword and a dagger, since a dagger was easy to conceal and could more efficiently land a hit on an enemy, though Maddie always just enjoyed the extra power and exhilaration that came with wielding a sword. (That didn't stop her from keeping a dagger under her pillow at night, even though her sword only laid against the end of her bunk. Hey, it’s always good to be cautious.)

Maddie was strapping on her armor when Kate walked over, her own sword strapped to her side. “Hey nerd,” she greeted.

“Hey dweeb,” Maddie said without skipping a beat. She smiled. “Athena and Apollo are gonna kick some war kids' asses today, huh?”

“You mean _Apollo_ and Athena,” Kate corrected.

“Whatever, same old same old. We're still kicking some butt today.”

“You're such a dork.”

“But I'm a lovable dork,” Maddie replied, cracking a side grin.

“I only hang out with you because you're my fellow cult leader and I need someone to hold down the sacrifices.” Kate's straight face didn't even waver for a second.

“You think I don't know that already, _Kaitlyn_?” Maddie teased, looping her arm through Kate's as they started walking to the podium where Mr. D would explain the rules while simultaneously acting slightly drunk, even though he's been without his precious wine for over fifty years. There was also the fact that he was a god. Maybe being the wine god meant you were always kind of drunk sometimes?

“Ew, did you just call me by my full name?” Kate asked, feigning shock. “I'm disgusted. I'm so disappointed in you Madelyn.”

Maddie scrunched up her nose. “Ew, stop, I'm not used to you using my full name.”

“You started it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

They reunited with their cabin leaders as more prepared campers gathered around. She caught Annabeth’s eye and smiled a little. She smiled back.

Eli was there with his bow and quiver, Spencer and Evelyn with their daggers, and Emma, another friend and cabin mate, with her sword.

“Is Athena ready for battle?” Maddie asked playfully as she joined them. 

“I don't see why I have to participate,” Eli complained. He was a pacifist, against violence totally, unless it was to defend against monsters. He was also not very...physically inclined. An excellent shot, but that could only help so much in capture the flag. He was always paranoid about getting ambushed. The probability was low, but Eli always argued that it was _there_. 

Maddie rolled her eyes. “Because I'm making you. Besides, no one's going to get seriously injured. No maiming, plus,” she plucked an arrow from his quiver and pointed to the head, “rubber tipped arrows. And I'll stay with you. Don't worry.”

Spencer made a gagging sound and pointed into his mouth. Emma smacked his head while Evelyn sniggered. “As cute as this little brother-sister moment is,” Spencer said, rubbing the back of his head and obviously trying to keep his voice from breaking, “Annabeth is starting to give out orders.”

The plan was simple. Stick the newbie on border patrol to distract Clarisse and her gang, since for some reason she had something against the kid. Luke would then infiltrate to get the flag with a team flanking his back. That team was Maddie, Eli, Zack from Hephaestus, and Leila from Hermes. The rest would be a distraction for the remaining members of the red team. Annabeth came up with the plan and she was the best strategist at camp, followed by Malcolm and Maddie, though Maddie refused to admit it. Maya, yet another Athena camper, was also very notable when it came to strategy. 

But since it was an Annabeth plan, it was almost a surefire win for the blue team.

Mr. D finished explaining the rules and the game began. Everyone ran into the forest.

Maddie, Eli, Zack, and Leila followed Luke to the red team's base, helping him fend off enemies as they made their way to the flag. Maddie and Zack fought off the red team with their swords, Leila with her dagger, and Eli shot people from the trees. The plan was working.

They made it to the red team’s base, and Luke grabbed the flag as the rest of them took on the red team's defenders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's it folks go home


End file.
